In Memory of Wilson Harris 1921-2018<\/em><\/p>\n I would like to give special mention to the Tweedle Dum to my Tweedle Dee, and to Miss Cahill \u2013 I have my sanity to thank you for.<\/p>\n I would also like to respectfully acknowledge those who were lost on 18 November 1978 and those they left behind. My years of studying Peoples Temple have opened my eyes in unprecedented ways, and to them and those who continue their research and artistic efforts, I owe much of my own personal growth.<\/p>\n Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n Considering that the Jonestown Massacre (1978) was the most deadly event in modern history \u2013 excluding wartime deaths and natural disasters, second now only to 9\/11 \u2013 its cultural representation is significantly small. The multitude of voices of Jonestown, dead and alive, seem to have faded into silence rather than becoming a prominent feature in historical discourse.<\/p>\n Through analysing the two key pieces of literature in the first 20 years after the massacre \u2013 Wilson Harris\u2019 Jonestown <\/em>(1996) and Fred D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s Bill of Rights <\/em>(1998) \u2013 this essay explores how these Guyanese writers comprehend the obliviation of Peoples Temple and history\u2019s treatment of the events and its members. D\u2019Aguiar and Harris endeavour to rehabilitate the memory of Jonestown and Peoples Temple not only into Guyana\u2019s historical discourse but also into a temporally and spatially unlimited arena of discourse by appealing to the \u2018universal dimension\u2019 of the topic.<\/p>\n I will be augmenting my analysis with psychologist Carl Jung\u2019s work, because his theories on the collective unconscious, archetypes and the process of \u2018individuation\u2019 resonate with the texts\u2019 mission of re-remembering. Memorialisation is not confined to the individual. It is intrinsically bound to the collective and the environment to form a palimpsestuous journey that crosses cultural, spatial and temporal boundaries.<\/p>\n Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n Introduction <\/a> <\/a>Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n To recall the events that took place in the Guyanese jungle on 18 November 1978, is to partake in an act of un-forgetting. By the end of the day, five victims, including a US Congressman, had been killed on Port Kaituma airstrip, a woman and her three children had taken their lives in Georgetown, and 909 people lay dead in the Jonestown commune in the Guyanese jungle. The members of Peoples Temple had committed an act of \u2018revolutionary suicide\u2019 en masse by administering cyanide-laced punch following the leadership of preacher Jim Jones. The mass-murder suicide brought to an end Peoples Temple\u2019s 23-year life as a prospering New Religious Movement (NRM) that incorporated pentecostal, socialist and communalist principles into its group philosophy. What is remembered about Peoples Temple tends to be confined to the violence of a single week in 1978 and harrowing iconic images of a patchwork of bodies piled in the Amazon jungle (see figure A).[1]<\/sup><\/a> However, it tends to be forgotten that Peoples Temple ran the first interracial church in Indiana at a time when, \u2018with few exceptions, blacks and whites did not share church pews,\u2019 that they helped thousands of people through charitable aid and became a political force in the 1970s.[2]<\/sup><\/a> The Temple\u2019s exodus to their self-established commune, Jonestown, in Guyana in 1977 not only marks the beginning of the end for the Temple but, I argue, also signifies them stepping out of a nationalised historical discourse. They were stepping into a void of memory.<\/p>\n Considering the magnitude of the Jonestown tragedy, there has been little canonical literary work produced, leaving Jonestown victim Richard Tropp\u2019s beseechment in his last letter, \u2018something must come of this,\u2019 unfulfilled.[4]<\/sup><\/a> I am choosing to focus on Wilson Harris\u2019 Jonestown<\/em> (1996) and Fred D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s poem Bill of Rights <\/em>(1998) due to their 20-year proximity to the events, as well as each author\u2019s shared Guyanese heritage. It is significant that what can be marked as the first piece of literature produced in the wake of the tragedy was Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky\u2019s poem \u2018Guyana,\u2019 which was published in the New York Times<\/em> on 2 December 1978. He writes that he does not see \u2018hippies, not a group-sex cult\u2019 but sees \u2018the flame of Russia\u2019s Old Believers\u2019 in the \u2018poisoned angels.\u2019[5]<\/sup><\/a> It is the Temple\u2019s affiliation with the Soviet Union\u2019s ideological beliefs and their emigration from the US that I believe has led to the Temple and the Jonestown events being considered \u2018un-American.\u2019 Similarly, the Temple\u2019s immigrant status and the colonialist ring of \u2018Jonestown\u2019 contributes to the events being shunned from Guyana\u2019s cultural history. D\u2019Aguiar and Harris are attempting to rehabilitate the memory of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, not only into Guyana\u2019s history but into a temporally and spatially unlimited arena of discourse by appealing to the \u2018universal dimension\u2019 of the topic.[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The first text I will be looking at is Guyanese-born author Fred D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s book-length poem Bill of Rights <\/em>(1998). Born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and raised in both Guyana and the US, D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s multi-facetted nationality effectually emulates the Middle Passage and situates him assuredly in Gilroy\u2019s \u2018Black Atlantic.\u2019[7]<\/sup><\/a> These hemispheric links are explored in the poem, reframing the \u2018coloniality of Jones\u2019 enterprise in terms of the long-term psychic damage it has done, and continues to do so, to individual subjects\u2019 and, I argue, to historical memory.[8]<\/sup><\/a> Guyana remains at the centre of D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s works. He often uses real historical events, such as the Zong Massacre (1781) in his novel Feeding the Ghosts<\/em>, to, in his own words, \u201cattempt to fill in the gaps of an eradicated past and to understand history through personality, through people and their experiences rather than by a rehearsal of dates and events.\u201d[9]<\/sup><\/a> D\u2019Aguiar is overtly concerned with art\u2019s role as \u2018a moral, intellectual and emotional force\u2019 that truly engages and grapples with the past, rather than merely reflecting on it. To engage with history is to be party to a form of resurrection.[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Harris is far more studied then D\u2019Aguiar, who serves as his contemporary. He has often resisted definition as a postcolonial author but, as Sara Upstone comments, it is exactly \u2018his refusal to be defined by others as postcolonial, and his insistence instead on claiming a world history and culture as his own\u2019 that makes him so relevant to postcolonial studies.[11]<\/sup><\/a> Harris has been troubled by the role of art and literature in the face of terror and catastrophe long before the contemporary level of interest peaking in the post 9\/11 world.[12]<\/sup><\/a> Jonestown is situated in a context that transcends pre-prescribed temporal and spatial boundaries through the cross-blending of cultural references that places the events, and the trauma induced, in a planetary perspective. Harris overrides the notion of the Jonestown events being anomalous in history by offering an epic reading of violence as the result of striving for \u2018unity of place\u2019 \u2013 the archetypal longing which has shaped the Caribbean, and the wider world, as we know it.[13]<\/sup><\/a> Both D\u2019Aguiar and Harris\u2019 work \u2018free[s] language from conventional formulae\u2019 in order to speak a universal truth.[14]<\/sup><\/a> Harris\u2019 unique \u2018quantum fiction\u2019 is challenging but serves as the ideal emphatic vehicle to \u2018weigh\u2019 \u2018the lives and limbs of those who have perished […] as incredible matter-of-fact that defies the limits of realistic discourse.\u2019[15]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Literature is the ideal means of memorialisation, to \u2018find the symbolic, the eternal,\u2019 in the Jonestown events, as Richard Tropp bequests in his final letter written on 18 November.[16]<\/sup><\/a> This project looks to explore how Harris and D\u2019Aguiar are using their work to re-contextualize the Jonestown events in reference to Guyana\u2019s history and its unique landscape. I will be augmenting my analysis with psychologist Carl Jung\u2019s work because his theories on the collective unconscious, archetypes and the process of \u2018individuation\u2019 resonate with the texts\u2019 mission of re-remembering. I must stress that I am not engaging with Jung from an essentialist standpoint, but aligning his theories to produce a cultural understanding of historical trauma and memory. The Temple\u2019s philosophy of wanting to form a \u2018collective consciousness\u2019 and their belief that they were engaged in \u2018a long search, a long struggle \u2013 going back not only in [their] own lifetime, but a long painful heritage\u2019[17]<\/sup><\/a> resonates with Jung\u2019s ideologies in reference to cultural memory.[18]<\/sup><\/a> By placing the texts in this context and exploring their abstract interrogation with the past, the Jonestown events can be appreciated as a meaningful proxy for re-evaluating the nature and influence of the historical archetype.<\/p>\n <\/a>Chapter 1<\/strong><\/p>\n In Fred D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s Bill of Rights, <\/em>the Jonestown events are placed in the context of Guyanese history in order to re-assimilate them into cultural memory. Like Harris\u2019 protagonist, Francisco Bone, the speaker in the poem has survived the mass murder-suicide and is working through his trauma through the act of writing, in this case through letters to his friend, L\u2013. He is \u2018feeling [his] way into the past, […] stepping through the mirror into the unknown,\u2019 to engage with Jung\u2019s archetypes of the \u2018collective unconscious.\u2019[19]<\/sup><\/a> The exploration and reformation of these archetypes is an attempt to rehabilitate historical events and experiences (such as the Jonestown Massacre, the slave trade and settler colonialism) into collective memory. The revisitation of the past, rather than being an act of mimesis, is a transformative process intent on healing the historical wounds inflicted by a culturally ingrained forgetting.[20]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The speaker in the text is fragmented, conveying the dualistic experiences of Jonestown members and survivors and also those whose lives were irreversibly changed and fragmented from colonial contact.[21]<\/sup><\/a> The internal division of the individual is a microcosmic exemplification of the disjointed foundations in cause and belief on which the Temple membership was built in the 1950s through the 1970s:<\/p>\n We are standing on the promontory Black and White, urban and rural, Salman\u2019s The speaker\u2019s metaphorical division between the oppositions in the last stanza depicts \u2018radical-dualistic\u2019 nature of the Temple.[23]<\/sup><\/a> This dualism is encompassing, temporally, ideologically and physically and is conveyed through the split nature of the poem\u2019s form. Salman Rushdie\u2019s East, West <\/em>(1994) is a collection of short stories which question the notions of East\/West and fiction\/reality as opposing cultural constructs.[24]<\/sup><\/a> The text\u2019s reference here highlights the parallels between the doubled existence of Temple members, themselves effectively immigrants, and the \u2018stereoscopic vision\u2019 immigrant writers (such as Rushdie) were endowed with because of their duality.[25]<\/sup><\/a> There were notable discrepancies in Temple members\u2019 reasoning for joining the Temple; its religious, socialist and communalist aspects appealed to a range of individuals. By being part of the Temple, the individual existence is doubled. However, it is inferred that this duality can potentially allow for a depth and elaborated texture of vision and existence if empowered by the reformation of memory.<\/p>\n The fractured and de-linearised form of the poem represents these wider ideological divisions but also evokes the \u2018internally divided, traumatized subjectivity\u2019 of the self-alienated speaker.[26]<\/sup><\/a> There is an irregular use of rhyme and meter throughout the poem, and most of the sections are split into two grouped stanzas per page, the second one being italicized. These sections can be read as a division between the conscious and unconscious. The prolific use of anaphora and the italicisation of the latter stanzas of each section makes them read as shamanistic chanting: \u2018Holy Him holy me holy you\/ Holy this holy that holy de-tarat\u2026\u2019 <\/em>(6). However, this chanting is satirical, rather than transcendental, as the speaker\u2019s anaphoras \u2018attempt to create meaning from a scene that is meaningless to him.\u2019[27]<\/sup><\/a> The repetitive nature of these italicized stanzas also reads like an indoctrination which, when reading them as outlets of the unconscious, represents an intrapersonal oppression akin to that recounted by many Temple members. This inhibition of self, in Jungian terms, prevents \u2018individuation\u2019: \u2018the process by which a person becomes a psychological \u201cindividual\u201d. That is a separate, indivisible unit or \u201cwhole.\u201d\u2019[28]<\/sup><\/a> Significantly, Jung asserted that this aspired synthesis of the conscious and unconscious cannot be relied on \u2018an ideology or the state,\u2019 as the speaker is attempting to accomplish through their commitment to Peoples Temple and its leader Jim Jones.[29]<\/sup><\/a> It is only through the detachment from the Temple this \u2018individuation\u2019 can take place. This separation is marked in the text by the day of the mass suicide during which the speaker suffers from a \u2018fever inside [his] marrow\u2019 (100); his fever symbolises a purifying or refining process in which the speaker constitutes a crucible of sorts. Just as Jung draws on the parallels between \u2018the series of changes described by the alchemists and the process of individuation,\u2019 D\u2019Aguiar employs this metaphor to depict his speaker\u2019s symbolic renewal after the Jonestown Massacre.[30]<\/sup><\/a> Notably, it is at this point of achieving a new relative wholeness of self that the italicisation of stanzas ceases. The poem\u2019s form is symbiotic with the condition of the speaker\u2019s progress towards \u2018individuation.\u2019<\/p>\n The speaker\u2019s self is reduced to a mechanical status in the poem, symbolising his internal fragmentation which inhibits the process of \u2018individuation\u2019; his Uzi gun and his Seiko watch come to define him. His Uzi is pledged to both his lover, Tikka, \u2018in suppliance to [her]… in slavery to [her]\u2019 <\/em>(29) and Jones also; the gun represents his loyalty, autonomy and masculine force. Both the speaker\u2019s \u2018timepiece and gun had ceased \/ Functioning\u2019 (83) upon arriving in Guyana. It is as though while part of the Temple, the protagonist loses his autonomy and is extracted from linear time. This idea links to the earlier quote where the speaker imagines himself \u2018on the promontory \/ In Greenwich park\u2019 (101), the birthplace of time. He inhabits a liminal temporal space representative of the structure of \u2018apocalyptic time\u2019 Jones drew to found his apocalyptic heaven on earth, ultimately denying his followers individual subjectivity.[31]<\/sup><\/a> For Jones, historical time was a bad dream from which death was the only means of escape, the Temple was simply \u2018born before [its] time \u2013\u2018[32]<\/sup><\/a> time was just as much the enemy as the US[33]<\/sup><\/a>. It is ironic then that the Uzi and Seiko continue functioning upon Jones\u2019 death. Coming back to the Jungian process of \u2018individuation,\u2019 Jung\u2019s belief that \u2018the unconscious has a Janus-face: on one side its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric world of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future\u2019 resonates with the speaker\u2019s symbolic temporal liminality.[34]<\/sup><\/a> Through the speaker\u2019s reassimilation into linear time, represented by his Seiko watch working, he regains temporal subjectivity that is fundamental to the constitution of the unconscious and, thereby, to his progress towards selfhood.<\/p>\n The objectification of Temple members in the text is mimetic of the media\u2019s. The New York Times, <\/em>specifically, reduced the actions of the Temple members to brainwashed motions in order to provide a somewhat palatable explanation for the events in 1978.[35]<\/sup><\/a> Perhaps even more representative of the media\u2019s dehumanisation of Temple members is the employment of the zombie motif in the poem. Temple members are presented as living death-in-life existences: their \u2018doubt\u2019 is metaphorised as \u2018worms [they] pull for each other from [their] flesh\u2019 (20), creating an image of a community of corpses. The zombie is traced back to Haiti in the nineteenth century and finds expression in regions where imperialism and slavery incited discourses associated with compromised subjectivities.[36]<\/sup><\/a> Parallels are hence drawn again between the condition of the Temple members and the post-slavery\/postcolonial subject. Both are withdrawn from the collective; the post-slave subject does not resemble an individual in a naturally established group dynamic, nor, paradoxically, does the Temple member. Upon entering the church, inductees were encouraged to sell their belongings and turn their assets into the Temple and many changed their names \u2013 their selfhood was redefined by their membership in the Temple.[37]<\/sup><\/a> The employment of this motif links back to the overarching principles of Jungian consciousness. Just as the zombie is a figure who is \u2018unable to generate a consciousness of self,\u2019 the speaker exists in a liminal space prohibiting self-realisation and fulfillment.[38]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n D\u2019Aguiar effectively uses images and motifs that symbolise the paradox between destruction and survival (such as the Uzi and the alive-but-dead individual) which, according to Cathy Caruth\u2019s theory on trauma and history, enables traumatic experience to be recognised. Resultantly, \u2018we can also recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility at the heart of catastrophic experience\u2019 \u2013 historical memory can remain authentic, and its ghosts humanised, without extraneous explication and unanimous understanding.[39]<\/sup><\/a> Whereas the media retold events as both \u2018burlesque and grotesque,\u2019 in order for the critic to ultimately accept the events from a \u2018higher synthesis,\u2019 representative art conveys the open-endedness of the subject matter.[40]<\/sup><\/a> In a very literal sense, the historical topic of Jonestown and Peoples Temple is incomplete. The final death count fluctuates when considering the five victims shot on the airstrip and\/or the deaths of Sharon Amos and her three children in Georgetown following Jones\u2019 radioed orders. To this day 412 bodies lay unnamed in a mass grave in Oakland, California.[41]<\/sup><\/a> D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s poem \u2018At the Grave of an Unnamed African\u2019 resonates with this context, as the speaker addresses the dead saying \u2018the barefaced that you\u2019re unnamed feels like defeat.\u2019[42]<\/sup><\/a> How can the nameless be properly remembered? Contemporary artists are taking this \u2018defeat\u2019 and being empowered by it. For example, Laura Baird\u2019s tapestry depicting the iconic aerial shot of the Jonestown dead is deliberately unfinished to signify that the story of Peoples Temple will never be concluded (see Figure B).[43]<\/sup><\/a> Bill of Rights <\/em>and Harris\u2019 Jonestown <\/em>reflect this sentiment through their use of non-linear form and dreamscape; both texts have a sense of being unfinished. Hena Maes-Jelinek deems the last line of D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s sequence, \u2018the authorities are none the wiser\u2019 (133) anticlimactic, and I agree. However, it is this inconclusiveness specifically in reference to hegemonic knowledge that truly conveys the historical status of Peoples Temple and the events in 1978.[44]<\/sup><\/a> As Rebecca Moore reflects in her keystone piece of literature: \u2018understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple means appreciating that some questions have no answer.\u2019[45]<\/sup><\/a> Bill of Rights <\/em>is not attempting to validify the facts and figures in relation to Jonestown, but explores \u2018the symbolic [and] the eternal\u2019 in the events, just as Richard Tropp implored in his last letter on 18 November 1978.[46]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n D\u2019Aguiar explores the symbolic resonance of Jonestown and the Temple by utilising mythological figures and symbols. The employment of these mytho-historical motifs entwines the history of Peoples Temple with Guyana\u2019s history and links to the establishment of Jung\u2019s work on \u2018archetypes.\u2019 It was Jung\u2019s knowledge of comparative religion and mythology which led to him discovering what he believed was \u2018a myth-producing level of mind which was common to all men\u2019: the collective unconscious.[48]<\/sup><\/a> The mythological motifs or primordial images which constitute the collective unconscious are \u2018archetypes.\u2019 These \u2018archetypes\u2019 are not inborn but rather originate as \u2018deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.\u2019[49]<\/sup><\/a> Their engagement in the speaker\u2019s sequences places the Jonestown Massacre in Guyanese culture and history rather than the historical limbo it traditionally tends to occupy.<\/p>\n The figure of \u2018Old Higue\u2019 is manifested to parallel \u2018Holy Him\u2019 <\/em>(Jones), \u2018Holy Pontius Pilate\u2019 <\/em>and \u2018holy Judas Iscariot\u2019 <\/em>(6), thereby satirizing Jones\u2019 self-appointed position as a prophet. Allsop\u2019s Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage <\/em>define \u2018Old Higue\u2019 as:<\/p>\n A legendary evil, wrinkled old woman, who hides by day, but by night sheds her skin which she carefully hides in a jar, then becomes a ball of fire roving in the air to seek out and light upon sleeping victims, esp babies, whose blood she sucks[…][50]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The affiliation of Old Higue to Jones represents the well-documented perfidiousness of Jones\u2019 personality and also links to the 304 children who were deemed as murdered on 18 November. Cannibalism is a theme in both Bill of Rights <\/em>and Jonestown<\/em> as the texts explore the traditions of native Caribs \u2013 Carib notably being the epistemological root of \u2018cannibal.\u2019 The image of the \u2018Carib bone flute\u2019 is employed by the speaker when he describes the bodies in Jonestown as \u2018A thousand flutes piled on top, \/ Each other\u2019 and during his encounter with the griot where he forges a flute from the bone of a canary (14-15). Bone flutes were made from the bones of Caribs\u2019 dead enemies, creating \u2018a bridge upon which the ghost of music runs […] between the living and the dead.\u2019[51]<\/sup><\/a> The metaphorisation of Jones\u2019 victims into flutes beckons a re-communion with the dead and further connects the Jonestown killings with the Renaissance colonial conquest and its victims.[52]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The most resonant myth employed in reference to Guyana\u2019s cultural history is that of El Dorado. Jonestown is described as the speaker\u2019s \u2018budding El Dorado\u2019 (30); the allegory is used far more by Harris in Jonestown.<\/em> Conquistadors, such as the infamous Sir Walter Raleigh, believed Guyana to be the location of the mystical city of gold, and it henceforth became an ideal site of pilgrimage.[53]<\/sup><\/a> I will speak more about the myth of El Dorado in the next chapter. However, I wish to draw on Maes-Jelinek\u2019s closing line of her essay, \u2018The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel\u2019 (1971), as it resonates with Jung\u2019s aforementioned interest in alchemy\u2019s relationship with psychology. Just as Jung visualises the pursuit to \u2018make gold,\u2019 to effectively \u2018perfect everything in its own nature,\u2019 <\/em>as paralleling the process of \u2018individuation,\u2019[54]<\/sup><\/a> Maes-Jelinek remarks that \u2018each man carries in himself his own El Dorado.\u2019[55]<\/sup><\/a> The evolution of the El Dorado myth from a conquistador lure to an instrument in the exploration of man\u2019s consciousness is expressed not only by the speaker in Bill of Rights<\/em> but in the lives of Temple members also.[56]<\/sup><\/a> The Temple\u2019s pursuit of paradise on earth is being explored by D\u2019Aguiar and Harris through engagement with archetypal images specific to Guyanese history.[57]<\/sup><\/a> This exemplification of the \u2018repeated experiences of humanity\u2019[58]<\/sup><\/a> echoes Richard Tropp\u2019s words in his final letter: \u2018We merge with millions of others, we are subsumed in the archetype.\u2019[59]<\/sup><\/a> For D\u2019Aguiar, the Temple and the events in Jonestown are being married to a collective of events and archetypes to reposition them in cultural memory.<\/p>\n The symbolic use of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl links to D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s engagement with the Guyanese landscape in the poem, specifically in regards to boundaries and rivers. Quetzalcoatl translates to \u2018the feathered serpent,\u2019 a combination of snake and eagle that simultaneously represents the contrast and unity of supreme divine being and earthly mortality (see Figure C). This juxtaposition of spirituality and transcendence with the matterful vitality of the snake, which \u2018rejuvenates itself by sloughing off its skin,\u2019[61]<\/sup><\/a> symbolises \u2018the resolution [to] the painful problem of human duality.\u2019[62]<\/sup><\/a> Quetzalcoatl is an envisionment of a world where the human soul can enjoy the divine presence and transgress boundaries between the earth and sky, material and spiritual. In Bill of Rights <\/em>the speaker appeals to Quetzalcoatl as he laments:<\/p>\n These are bodies lying on mud floors The speaker expresses that the Guyanese landscape will remain permanently scarred by the deaths in Jonestown, as it was by colonialism. Serpents, and therefore Quetzalcoatl, are often associated with water and rivers as is Guyana \u2013 the root-meaning of the Amerindian name \u2018Guiana\u2019 is \u2018land of many waters\u2019 (see Figure D).[63]<\/sup><\/a> The insinuation of the speaker that the Temple\u2019s dead will \u2018from now on\u2019 remain static at the banks of Guyana\u2019s rivers symbolises the liminal space the Jonestown dead occupy in historical memory. The plea to Quetzalcoatl can also be linked to the Jungian notion of structure. The Aztec God epitomises the interrelationship between symbolic opposites (earth\/sky, mortal\/divine) which Jung believed could come to represent a \u2018total world-view.\u2019[64]<\/sup><\/a> Ultimately, the employment of the mythological figure of Quetzalcoatl evokes an archetypal longing for border-crossing and harmony, both physical and spiritual, that is denied to the Jonestown dead and thereby to Guyana as a nation.<\/p>\n The prominent motif of boundaries and divisions that is emulated through the landscape in the poem works to entwine the events in 1978 with the wider cultural history of Guyana. Fiona Darroch writes that Guyana is a land shaped by moments of exchange and often violent contact; the landscape is defined by boundaries and historical moments not nationally felt as its own, the Jonestown events included.[66]<\/sup><\/a> In a 1998 interview, D\u2019Aguiar expressed his interest in using rivers to talk about place: \u2018See the Thames down there. It divides London right down the middle like a backbone. Talking about the Thames is a way of talking about London.\u2019[67]<\/sup><\/a> The speaker is repeatedly referring to Guyana as a country through its rivers; in the very first stanza he says he has come \u2018From hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, \/ To the Potaro, Essequibo, Demerara\u2019 (1). Falling between the Amazonian basin and the treacherous Atlantic, Guyana is a physically-liminal space that is paradoxically vast, and for the majority uninhabitable, whilst being geographically defined by movement and negotiation (see Figure E). Beginning with Columbus, then Dutch and British colonists and the ensuing arrival of slaves in the seventeenth century, followed by the influx of indentured Indian labourers in the nineteenth century, Guyana\u2019s borders have consistently been encroached by alien peoples.[68]<\/sup><\/a> The settling of Peoples Temple is a repetition of these foreign settlements. The speaker\u2019s statement that \u2018Yoknapatawpha county,\/ [Guyana] was not\u2019 (9), referring to William Faulkner\u2019s fictionalised county draws on the irony of mapping borders on the landscape. When on top of one of the Roraima mountains, the speaker says:<\/p>\n Look as I did<\/em> The weather and the landscape do not conform to man-made boundaries. The synthesis of \u2018shadow and light\/ Covering all things equally\u2019<\/em> again links to the Jungian principles of opposites and equilibrium. Bone expresses a similar sentiment in Jonestown <\/em>as he recalls \u2018Commonsense engineers\u2019 deciding in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that the coastlines were \u2018deemed flat\u2019 and \u2018as a consequence they smothered the breath-lines in a living landscape\u2019 (172). Man\u2019s contrived manipulation of the landscape is construed as a stifling, life-taking act. It is insinuated that the transgression of established boundaries, in reference to both the landscape and historical understanding, will ultimately allow for the \u2018total-world view\u2019 for which man should strive.<\/p>\n As discussed, Guyana as a nation has been historically defined by movements of people pursuing the archetypal longing for the creation of space. In Bill of Rights, <\/em>the emigrant Temple members are paralleled to both colonial settlers and maroons (fleeing slaves) \u2013 groups exemplifying the desire for space-making.[70]<\/sup><\/a> Each form of emigration is similar in that marronage depends on \u2018distance, movement, property, and purpose, at work at every scale of politics\u2019 \u2013 like colonialism.[71]<\/sup><\/a> Likewise, Wilson Harris\u2019 expression in his 1949 article, \u2018The Realities of Trespass,\u2019 that colonial processes are always marked by \u2018an anguish of longing\u2019 for the \u2018past security\u2019 of abandoned homelands, resonates with the ambitions of fleeing slaves in the Caribbean and Peoples Temple.[72]<\/sup><\/a> In the poem, the members of Peoples Temple clear the land and find themselves at odds with the hostile jungle, much like colonial settlers and maroon communities before them. The speaker writes:<\/p>\n To wave a mosquito from the forehead<\/em> Pexa notes that the figuring of this clearing process so early in the speaker\u2019s Jonestown experience suggests the \u2018fragility\u2019 and \u2018belatedness\u2019 of Jonestown\u2019s neo-colonial presence. The colonialist concept of Guyanese land being \u2018terra nullius,\u2019 or \u2018land belonging to no one,\u2019 is very much emulated through the Temple\u2019s ease of and disregard for clearing the land.[73]<\/sup><\/a> There is a foreshadowing of doom with the infernal imagery of \u2018smoke\u2019 and \u2018burn[ing]\u2019 and the all-consuming nature of the cloud \u2018over the entire planet\u2019 links to the exponential growth and destruction of colonial influence in history. This apocalyptic imagery enforces what Pexa labels as settler-colonial apocalyptic time which consigns its inhabitants to a \u2018permanent state of in-betweenness\u2019 that prohibits traumatic healing \u2013 a liminality I have previously discussed.[74]<\/sup><\/a> That the Temple members\u2019 \u2018feet are winged by [their] faith,\u2019 as \u2018[they] rip those vines from their roots\u2019 (20), reads as an allegory for the Christianity-driven Spanish Conquistadors and British colonists who attempted to destroy Guyana\u2019s cultural \u2018roots.\u2019 The desire for new space is rooted in human consciousness and underscores the Caribbean\u2019s colonial past and the Temple\u2019s exodus to the jungle. Through the excavation of this desire for virgin space our relationship to the past, and the trauma inflicted by it, can be rehabilitated in cultural memory.[75]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
\nChapter 1<\/a>
\nChapter 2<\/a>
\nConclusion <\/a>
\nBibliography <\/a>
\nNotes <\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/04-boote-1.jpg\")
<\/a>Figure A- David Hume Kennerly\/Getty Images[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nIn Greenwich Park, facing an easterly
\nDirection, one foot either side the meridian,
\nA foot in each camp, as it seemed then:<\/p>\n
\nEast, West, <\/em>romantic and cynic rolled into one.[22]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/04-boote-2.jpg\")
<\/a>Figure B- Laura Baird\u2019s Jonestown Carpet[47]<\/sup><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/04-boote-3.jpg\")
<\/a>Figure C- The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl as depicted in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (16th century)[60]<\/sup><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nIn huts; on the grass; around dead fires;
\nIn final embraces throughout
\nThe neat wooden walkways;
\nOn every clearing and from now on
\nBy the banks of the Potaro, the Mazaruni,
\nEssequibo, Corentyne, Demerara.
\nAt Timehri. Quetzalcoatl,
\nTell me this is not so. (113)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/04-boote-04.jpg\")
<\/a>Figure D- River map of Guyana[65]<\/sup><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nThere was no sign of the border<\/em>
\nBush was unbroken<\/em>
\nRivers twisted to the four winds<\/em>
\nA sudden shower <\/em>
\nCrossed the entire vista <\/em>
\nIn one sweep of shadow and light<\/em>
\nCovering all things equally<\/em>
\nWith its mineral bath <\/em>(91)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/04-boote-05.jpg\")
<\/a>Figure E- Population density map based on 1960 census.[69]<\/sup><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nTakes more effort than to clear this forest<\/em>
\nClear this continent of all its wood<\/em>
\nBurn that wood into smoke into cloud<\/em>
\nSpread that cloud over the entire planet[…] <\/em>(5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n